I hope you can find it in you to honor the wish of an old man and indulge his silly fancies. You may think me dramatic, mad even, but there’s a reason for my wish, a reason I swore to the Lord God I’d never tell a soul for as long as I lived.
And yet I know you’re all wondering, given my devotion to the gospel, why I never entered a church and was opposed to being buried in the family plot.
It’s because of what happened more than half a century ago, because of the fall of Father Ascher.
You all know I was drafted into the national militia as part of the Volkssturm. A boy no older than sixteen, forced to partake in the madness that was the final year of the war.
During those weeks, I bore witness to the worst atrocities of man; the demons hidden deep inside every last one of us. After our surrender to the Americans, I became a prisoner of war and was subjected to the hardest labor.
The only thing that gave me solace, made it all bearable, was the Word of God.
After more than a year I was finally allowed to return home, but our picturesque little village was almost unrecognizable.
The roads, the buildings, the wide meadows and rich forests, they were all still there, but not the people. So many of us set out for the war – were forced to – and so few returned. Even our village, this remote speck of the world, hadn’t been left unscathed.
Our small town’s population had been reduced to scarcely more than the very old, the very young, and poor, widowed women.
The air was heavy with misery. The war might have been over, but people had lost too much, had suffered too much, and now even their hope for the future was all but gone.
Just like me, they sought solace in the gospel, the Word of God. For that reason, every Sunday, the entire village set out to our small chapel to partake in the sermons held by our preacher, Father Ascher.
The chapel was a gloomy thing and stood on a lonely hill, ways off from the village at the edge of a dark and unruly tarn. It was supposed to be a house of God, but its atmosphere was one entirely different. It was a dull, unceremonious building, a sluggish construction, one of excessive antiquity, that had been erected centuries ago during the village’s earliest days. Its stones were discolored, the wood paneling half-rotten, giving it an aura of near-pestilence.
This age, this dilapidation, was most notable in a fissure that went through the bell-tower and down the front of the building.
The chapel’s surroundings were no different. The graveyard’s earth was sodden, perpetually muddy, the ground fresh as if constantly broken to prepare fresh graves. Most unsettling however, was the tarn’s fog. In the earliest hours of the day, it rose from the dark waters and covered the chapel grounds like mystic vapor.
After my return, I ventured forth to pay the building a visit in order to pray to our Lord God, but its interior only intensified the gloomy feelings its exterior appearance gave it. The tapestries against the walls and the altar were colorless, the ebon floor stained and blacked with the accumulated soot of ages.
Whenever the Father held his sermons, he only ever lit a select few candles, but their dim glow was never enough to reach the chapel’s more remote angles or its high ceiling.
The rows of pews were as antiquated as the rest of the building. They were comfortless, worm-eaten things and filled the chapel’s air with an almost oppressive musty odor.
Similarly to the village itself the chapel, too, was a place heavy with sorrow, albeit of a different kind.
—
I quickly bonded with Father Ascher. He was an older man, but he too had been forced to partake in the war and had seen his share of atrocities. Thus, after his return, the man wanted to share what little light there was left in the world with his suffering congregation.
I saw how much the war had changed Ascher. When I was a young boy, the preacher had been a stout man, one full of life. Now his complexion was wan, his lips colorless, and his gait had become a limping shuffle caused by a crippling injury to his right leg.
His features, however, were as fine as ever. He had a prominent chin, finely carved cheekbones, a delicate nose and eyes which were always sharp and luminous.
He was of peculiar character, that man; a sensible sort of temperament, but I’d known no one as passionate for the Word of God as him.
It must’ve been this character that drove him to bid me for assistance at the chapel. Given how engrossed I’d become in the bible, and aspiring to become a man of the cloth myself, I was quick to agree. Thus, I became the Father’s altar servant whenever my duties at the family farm allowed me to.
Much like the rest of us, the Father was a man with troubles of his own, namely in the form of his family; specifically his sister. She was a woman scarcely few people even remembered, or had never actually known about.
I only learned of her one night when I spied an apparition wandering the graveyard during the hour of twilight. She was an ethereal thing, one entirely without complexion. I only watched from afar, frozen by the strange vision in front of me.
When the Father saw whereupon my gaze fell, I learned that said apparition was indeed his sister, Margarete.
She suffered, the man told me, from a strange condition, one that made her walk in her sleep and her thoughts drift during what few brief hours she was awake. Further, it made her weak in body and she could only stomach the smallest variety of food.
For this reason, the preacher continued, she was almost always indoors, in his small lodgings at the side of the church, first cared for by their parents, and now by no-one other than the Father himself.
I never gave it much thought, and I never saw her again until months later.
—
It was in the late hours of the evening, and I made my way to the chapel to consult the Father on a certain passage within the gospel. That night, the tarn’s vapor seemed different. It was heavy, enshrouding the chapel, making it seem like a thing that could only exist within a dream. From inside, I heard sounds of the most hideous nature, a cacophony of shrill, high-pitched voices.
Cracking open the chapel’s door, I found its interior entirely warped. The feeble flames of the candles flared widely, and twisted shadows danced along the walls and the dull tapestries, as if they had a life of their own.
My eyes quickly wandered to the altar, where the Father stood, but not alone. He was with a woman, a woman without complexion, his sister. With a horror that threatened to shatter my soul, I realized that the pair were committing a sin far worse than any other; the sin of flesh.
The preacher’s face was distorted, pained, almost delirious, as if taken by a fever of the most terrible kind. I could only watch in stunned horror, but when his sister threw her head back, I saw her face for the shortest of moments. It was a face unlike any I’d seen before, a ghastly, distorted visage. Her eyes were wide, nothing but dark pupils, and her lips dripping with blood.
In an instant, I dashed from the building in sheer terror, unsure of what I’d just witnessed, but certain that it was a cursed, unholy thing.
Even now, as an old man, as I’m writing this, I remember lying in bed, unable to sleep. My mind was troubled, almost fevered, by what I’d seen, by the heinous act committed by the man I respected the most.
Yet as the hours ticked by, I wasn’t so sure anymore what had transpired. What if it all had been nothing but a hallucination, a trick of the mind? After all, might it not have been one of the many horrors I’d witnessed during my conscription, conjured up and altered by powers beyond my understanding? At least, that’s what I told myself, convinced myself of.
—
Come morning, I set out to consult Father Ascher, to inquire what had happened the night before. But alas, I did not get the chance to do so.
The prior night, tragedy had struck. On my way to the chapel, I learned that the preacher’s long sick sister had died. Her demise, however, I was informed, came not from her peculiar type of illness, but was supposedly of her own choosing.
When the Father returned to his lodgings after his nightly prayers, he’d found her dead in their home, her face swollen and purple, her throat covered in dark, red marks, the rope she’d used to hang herself with still fastened around her neck.
It was a tragedy like no other. Death might have been ever-occurring during these times, but this type of death – it was unheard of.
Before long, a summon from the Father himself reached me. He said it pained him terribly, but given his condition, his leg, he required assistance laying her to rest.
When I arrived at the chapel, the man was already waiting for me at the door. He was a terrible figure to behold, one powerless and tired. His eyes were red, his hands shaking, his lips quivering, and it seemed his leg was even worse today. Yet as I followed his shuffling gait towards his abode, his resolve, his voice, they were steadfast.
“She’s inside, but she’s been… prepared,” the preacher said.
That day, I saw his lodgings for the first time. They comprised nothing but a few miserable rooms. In the center of one of them, Margarete was propped up on a table. A white funeral gown enshrouded her body, hiding the marks of her terrible demise.
I asked about the funeral, about the date and time, but the Father informed me he’d take care of the required rites by himself.
“There’s no need,” he said, “to make this death a public display, a celebration even, during times like this. Too many people have died, and there’s so much pain already, so much death. This here, it’s my fault, and my fault alone. It’s no one but me who’s carrying this burden.”
Together, the two of us put the body into a cheaply made coffin before we carried it to the sodden graveyard beyond. The Father had already prepared a grave, but it was scarcely more than a small, damp hole, one almost too small to fit Margarete’s casket.
After we’d lowered it into the hole, the Father approached the coffin. He opened it and tore aside the funeral gown, revealing Margarete’s face, and allowing me to see it for the first time.
For a moment, I saw the previous night’s ghastly visage again, and gasped as I imagined the she-beast jumping from her grave. Then it was gone, the memory torn aside just as the shroud which had covered her face.
Margarete’s face was similar to the Father’s, almost strikingly so. I saw the same prominent chin, the same carved cheekbones, and a similarly delicate nose.
I learned then that Margarete wasn’t merely the Father’s sister, but his twin sister.
This face, however, wasn’t without mark. Her condition and way of death had caused it to be purple and swollen, making it look as if of a slight blush, and had distorted her mouth into the semblance of a perpetual half-smile, as if she’d chosen happily to part from this world and what must’ve been a most miserable existence.
Eventually, the Father bade me leave, so he could finish the rites of burial. After a moment of hesitation, I honored his wish and left him to his own devices. We all suffered and grieved in our own ways, after all.
—
In the weeks after Margarete’s death, the Father changed. Markedly so.
He became an almost unrecognizable figure. While he had always possessed a wan complexion, he became even more pale of skin, and his hair grew wild and unheeded, almost as if he was to change into something barely recognizable as human.
It wasn’t merely his appearance that changed, however, but also his character. Oftentimes, his voice became trembling, quivering, as if he was perpetually terrified of something unnamed. At other moments, he spoke energetically, rapidly and intensely excited, especially during his sermons.
By that point, he almost exclusively recited from The Book of Revelation. He spoke of Armageddon, but most of all, the Beast of Revelation, The Whore of Babylon. During these sermons, the man was incomparable to the trembling, quivering husk he’d become. He was loud and boisterous, as if intoxicated by his own words, thundering them, ranting on feverishly and pleading the Lord for protection from the darkness, from sins and temptation.
After these sermons, after the congregation left in a state of confusion and half-terror, the Father took to walking the chapel’s interior without object. Many times, I saw him staring vacantly, and listening to sounds not there.
I thought it was the grief and suffrage brought forth by the death of his only living relative. Yet sometimes, I wondered if there might be a more terrible secret surrounding the Father, one related to the night of Margarete’s death.
When I talked to him about his condition, about his changes, he played it off as nothing but a nervous affection, a small onset of his sister’s illness that seemed to have now passed onto him.
It put him into a state of acuteness of sense, he said, and now he too was afflicted by various ailments. He was only able to sustain certain foods. The faintest of lights tortured his eyes, and even the odors outside were too powerful for him to endure. So he, similarly to his sister, spent most of his time indoors, in either the chapel or his small lodgings. On the rare occasion he ventured outside, it was only during the hour of twilight.
—
Before long, the Father grew even thinner, so thin indeed that he looked gaunt, half-dead and much older than he truly was. This got me worried, for I believed he suffered not merely from a small onset of illness, but a terrible sickness of body and mind.
In these latter days, he eventually approached me and confided in me that I was to take over the chapel. Taken aback, I inquired what he meant, and after a deep sigh, he said he knew he was to perish soon. Yet as he said these words, shared the future he thought awaited him, a shudder went through the man. As much as he wanted to accept it, he could not give himself to the idea wholeheartedly. For he said, he was bound to this place, to what lay outside in its hidden depths.
These ramblings not only confused but scared me deeply, and I soon found myself affected by them as well. I grew superstitious of not only the Father but also the chapel and its surroundings, especially the sodden graveyard, and the mysterious vapor that rose from the tarn beyond.
This affection caused me many a sleepless night. Like the Father, I found myself pacing my home without objective, often almost unconsciously stealing glances at the chapel and its surroundings from the confines of my home.
Whenever I did, I was filled with a state of deepest alarm, and constantly listened for any and all sounds that reached me from the chapel.
Then one night, a night in which a terrible storm hailed down upon the village, I spied the Father outside, standing in front of the chapel’s doors, unmoving. Worried about his health, I set out towards him.
The chapel was almost entirely enshrouded by the tarn’s vapors, which were intensified by the heavy rainfall. The Father, however, just stood there, almost unaware of the terrible, raging storm.
“Let’s go inside, Father, this weather is dangerous for your body, your condition.”
And thus, I led the priest inside.
Only then did I notice the Father was mumbling to himself. He talked again of sounds, sounds he said were announcing the coming of the beast, the beast and its legions.
I was quick to calm the man down, and to assure him it was nothing but the thunder of the storm and we were alone and safe here, in the house of God.
Finally, I suggest I’d read him from his favorite part of the bible, The Book of Revelation.
“So you can calm your mind,” I whispered to him.
Then I opened my bible.
“The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew onto his servants things which most shortly come to pass,” I began to read.
As I did, the Father settled down, pushing himself against the altar, listening intently to my reading.
Page by page and chapter by chapter I read on, when things of the strangest nature transpired.
“And there were voices, and thundering, and lightning, and an earthquake,” I’d read when I thought I heard a chorus of barely audible, high-pitched voices from outside, from the graveyard.
I strained my ears to listen, but a roaring thunder strike cut through the air and shook the entirety of the Earth.
The Father, however, was entirely oblivious.
“And there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace.”
As soon as the line had left my mouth, I noticed a change had come over the chapel. The tarn’s vapor’s had slowly made their way inside via cracks in the backdoor, and now wafted over the floors, becoming denser and denser, making them appear more smoke than anything.
As this took place, I stared at the Father wearily, but the man wasn’t agitated, his eyes undisturbed, staring blankly ahead, absorbed in the gospel. Yet when I approached him and laid my hand on his shoulder, a shudder went through him and a sick smile appeared on his face.
He mumbled to himself again, not at all aware of my presence.
I strained and tried to listen, but once more the same high-pitched voices from outside reached my ears. The candles around us flared up, their fires growing stronger, stronger than should be possible. Once more, shadows danced along the walls and tapestries, twisted shadows that seemed to move in their own accord.
Another thunderous roar cut through the air, and with it, the chapel’s backdoor was thrown open. When I jerked around, I saw a figure standing in the doorframe; a ghastly, pale figure, one entirely shrouded in white.
The Father’s sister. Alive! As she stepped into the church, the funeral gown enshrouding her slid from her body, revealing a bloated, heavy stomach, showing that she was with child.
The Father next to me, still in a trance, began to mumble anew.
“And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colors.”
As I heard this, I couldn’t help but stare at Margarete, at her swollen, purple face, and the scarlet marks on her throat. Marks not from a rope, but hands!
In that moment, the Father snapped out of his trance. His voice changed from a whisper to a deafening scream.
“And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH,” he boomed out, his voice reverberating, almost shaking the chapel itself.
In terror, I stumbled away from the approaching she-beast. Yet she ignored me, had only eyes for the Father, for her brother.
When she reached him, he raised his hands again, put them around her throat once more, but only for a few fleeting moments. Then, not flinching, and not backing away, he surrendered himself to her, body and soul.
Behind her, the smoke was now wafting through the chapel, heavier, thicker, crawling up the walls and over the rows of seats. In-between, I thought I saw strange things; small, monstrous shadows.
I thought of Margarete’s bloated stomach, of what the Father had screamed, the mother of harlots and abominations, I thought of the perpetually fresh ground of the graveyard. I shuddered, as I realized what those creatures had to be, what might have been hidden out there, buried in the sodden earth.
Clutching onto my bible, I backed away towards the chapel’s entrance.
I watched in a terror-filled trance as the she-beast threw herself at the Father, driving her teeth into his throat, watched her tear the man’s priestly garments off of him.
In that moment, all I could do to save my sanity was to recite the very next line in The Book of Revelation, the one following that which the preacher had thundered through the chapel.
“And I saw the woman drunk with the blood of saints.”
As their fornication began, as their combined moans echoed through the chapel, I snapped out of my torpor and ran, ran from the chapel, from the vaporous, unholy grounds surrounding it, still clutching the bible, the Word of God in my hand. For it was the only thing which protected me from madness.
In that moment, another thunderous strike of lightning descended, right onto the fissure in the bell tower, tearing the chapel in two.
The flames inside spread in an instant, engulfing the entire building, and all that was within.
Then either side of the chapel’s remains crashed into each other, and the resulting impact caused the sodden grounds to become a landslide. Thus, mere moments later, the wreck of the chapel, the graveyard, and even the small hill it had been built on all vanished in the dark waters of the tarn below.
And as I stood there, stunned by what had just transpired, unable to move, all I could do was cling to my bible, and recite one final line.
“For true and righteous are his judgements: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.”
—
After what I’d witnessed that night, I gave up on becoming a preacher.
It is always those closest to God, those who are most devout, who are closest to sin and temptation, just like Father Ascher.
Still, I pray every night, and still I read the bible, but I do so alone.
This tale, these events, they are the reason I never entered a church again, and I was opposed to being buried at the family plot.
For sin and temptation and the creatures of the pit are always, always nearby.
